How to build a branded PowerPoint template for your team

Quick answer

Build the template in PowerPoint’s Slide Master view: set your brand colours and fonts as the theme, design a handful of layouts with your logo and placeholders already placed, then save it as a .potx template file and share it so everyone starts from it. Done once, it takes an afternoon.

The usual story goes like this. Someone in the business makes a decent deck. Someone else copies it, changes the font, stretches the logo and pastes in a chart in default blue. Six months later every presentation looks slightly different, and none of them look like the website or the van. A proper template stops that drift, because it puts the brand rules inside the file, where people cannot miss them.

Before you start: gather the brand pieces

You need four things on hand. If any are missing, sort them first, because a template built on guesses spreads the guesses everywhere.

• Logo files in a transparent format: PNG for safety, SVG if your version of PowerPoint supports it. A white or reversed version for dark slides. Our guide to transparent logo files explains which to use.
• Colour codes as hex or RGB values: your main colour, a secondary, a dark for text and one or two accents.
• Fonts for headings and body text, and a plan for what happens if a colleague does not have them installed.
• Rules for logo size, spacing and placement, usually in your brand guidelines.

If you do not have guidelines, our page on brand guidelines explains what they contain. Without them you will be inventing the rules while building the template.

Step 1: open Slide Master view

Create a new blank presentation, set the slide size you will use (16:9 suits almost every screen), then go to View and choose Slide Master. The large slide at the top of the left-hand panel is the master; the smaller ones beneath it are layouts. Microsoft’s explainer on what a slide master is is worth two minutes if you have never used it. Anything you put on the master appears on every layout, so treat it as the foundation.

Step 2: set theme colours and fonts

Still in Slide Master view, open the Colors menu and choose Customize Colors. PowerPoint gives you twelve slots: text and background darks and lights, six accents, and two for hyperlinks. Enter your hex codes. Accent 1 becomes the default for charts and shapes, so make it your main brand colour. Name the colour set after your business and save it.

Then open Fonts, choose Customize Fonts and set a heading and body font. This is what makes every new text box use your brand fonts without anyone thinking about it. If your brand font is unusual, plan for it now: PowerPoint can embed fonts in the file so they display on other machines, but licences vary, so check yours allows embedding. Otherwise pick a close, widely installed alternative for slides. Our guide to choosing fonts covers pairing.

Step 3: design the master slide

On the master itself, place the elements that belong on almost every slide: a small logo in one corner, a footer area, slide numbers, and the default title and body text styles. Keep it restrained. A logo on every slide works when it is small and in the same place each time, as set out in our guide on how to use your logo. Big watermarks and heavy borders make every slide harder to read.

Step 4: build the layouts your team actually needs

Delete the layouts you will never use and design the ones you will. Most small teams need six to eight.

Use placeholders, not ordinary text boxes. Placeholders are what make a colleague’s pasted text pick up your fonts, sizes and positions automatically. Rename each layout clearly, such as “Case study, image left”, so people choose the right one from the New Slide menu.

Step 5: add sample slides and guidance

Close Slide Master view and create a short example deck using each layout, with realistic content. Add a first slide titled “How to use this template” with three or four rules: use the layouts, do not change the fonts, keep the logo where it is, use accent colours for charts. People copy examples far more reliably than they follow instructions.

Step 6: save it as a template file

Go to File, Save As, and choose PowerPoint Template (.potx). Microsoft’s guide to creating and saving a template shows the steps for each version. A .potx opens as a new, untitled presentation every time, so nobody can accidentally overwrite the master copy.

Step 7: share it so it becomes the default

A template only works if it is the easiest thing to reach. Put the .potx in a shared folder everyone uses, and ask each person to save a copy into their own Custom Office Templates folder so it appears under Personal templates when they create a new presentation. If you use Microsoft 365 with a shared library, an administrator can make it available across the organisation. Remove old decks from the shared drive, or label them as archive, so people stop copying them.

Step 8: test it on someone else’s computer

Open the template on a colleague’s laptop and on a Mac if anyone uses one. Check the fonts display, the logo is sharp, the charts pick up the brand colours and the layouts behave when you paste in text from an email. Then fix what breaks before the whole team relies on it.

When to get it designed for you

Building a template yourself is very doable if your brand assets are in order. Where businesses get stuck is the step before: no proper logo files, no fixed colours, no font choices. That is a brand problem, not a PowerPoint problem, and it shows up on the website, social posts and paperwork as well.

Our brand identity design is £299 and sets the logo, colours, typography, imagery and brand guidelines your template is built from. With those in hand, the template takes an afternoon. All our prices are on the pricing page.